H.G. Wells

"I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world"

"The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it."

"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it."

"With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure."

"It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."

"Advertising is legitimised lying."

"Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one. And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other."

"Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau- and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me."

"He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself."

"To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world."

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change."

"The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential facts of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write."

"The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law."

"You see," I said, "I'm a socialist. I don't think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else."

"You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go."

"Civilization is a race between disaster and education."

"An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)"

"He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves."

"I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then."

"Kemp: I demonstrated conclusively this morning that invisibility--I. M: Never mind what YOU'VE DEMONSTRATED!--I'm starving, said the voice, and the night is--chilly for a man without clothes."